Lecture: "The radical innovation of the cinematic image: movement and projection"
Professor Emeritus Tom Gunning
Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College
Chicago University, Chicago, USA
Professor Tom Gunning is a 2022/2023 IAS Distinguished Scholar of the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies.
Abstract:
When cinema emerged at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century it was recognized as something new, but what exactly? Was it a technical invention, an improvement of photography, or a new form of entertainment? I want to explore what cinema introduced and to renew our sense of how this innovation changed our conception of the image in ways we now take for granted. I will focus on two aspects: the image that moves and the projected image. Both of these events changed the way the image relates to things like space, time and materiality. Today they are commonplace elements of our daily environment, but have we really recognized their transforming nature?
